Thus Aristophanes lowered his style to the level of his audience, but in his brighter moments, forgetting his failings and exigencies, he disowns expedients unworthy of the comic art.  He says he has not like “Phrynicus, Lycis, and Amisias” introduced slaves groaning beneath their burdens, or yelping from their stripes; he comes away, “a year older from hearing such stage tricks.”  “It is not becoming,” he observes in another place for a dramatic poet to throw figs and sweetmeats to the spectators to force a laugh, and “we have not two slaves throwing nuts from a basket.”  In his plays “the old man does not belabour the person next him with a stick.”  He claims that he has made his rivals give up scoffing at rags and lice, and that he does not indulge in what I have termed optical humour.  He has not, like some of his contemporaries, “jeered at the bald head,” and not danced the Cordax.  He seems in the following passage even to despise animal illustrations—­

     Bdelycleon. Tell me no fables, but domestic stories about men.

     Philocleon. Then I know that very domestic story, “Once on a time
     there was a mouse and a weazel.”

     Bdel. “Oh, thou lubberly and ignorant fellow,” as Theogenes said
     when he was abusing the scavenger.  Are you going to tell a story of
     mice and weazels among men?

Like most humorists he blames in one place what he adopts in another.

Plato had so high an opinion of Aristophanes that, in reply to Dionysius of Syracuse, he sent him a copy of his plays as affording the best picture of the commonwealth of Athens.  This philosopher is also said to have introduced mimes—­a sort of minor comedy—­from Sicily, and to have esteemed their composer Sophron so highly that he kept a copy of his works under his pillow.  Plato appreciated humour, was fond of writing little amatory couplets, and among the epigrams attributed to him is the following dedication of a mirror by a fading beauty, thus rendered by Prior:—­

  “Venus, take this votive glass,
   Since I am not what I was! 
   What I shall hereafter be,
   Venus, let me never see!”

Plato objected to violent laughter as indicative of an impulsive and ill-regulated temper, observing “that it is not suitable for men of worth, much less for the gods,” the first part of which remark shows that he was not emotional, and the second that a great improvement in critical taste had taken place since the early centuries of Homer and David.

As youth is romantic, and old age humorous, so in history sentiment precedes criticism and poetry attained a high degree of excellence, while humour was in its infancy.  Comedy is said to have been produced first in Sicily by Susarion in 564 B.C., but we have only two or three lines by which to judge of his work, and they are on the old favourite topic.  “A wife is an evil, but you can’t live in a house